Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to the fields of distributed internet services and middle ware, cloud computing services and computer models and their integration to enhance online commerce systems. More specifically, the present invention relates to computer systems, platforms, models and methods related to improving user experience with e-commerce systems in real time, such as transportation and the travel industry.
Description of the Related Art
The Internet has largely leveled the ground for delivery of application and information services. As a result, service providers, including online application/information providers, traditional application service providers (ASPs), network service providers, content/application delivery network (CDN/ADN) providers and device OEMs using embedded intelligent service functions, constantly seek ways to differentiate their products to grow market shares. The relatively new Cloud Computing technology enables many of the sub-systems of an enterprise application system, that are traditionally implemented with their own computing facilities, to be physically located within a centralized computing facility through “virtualization” technology, thus saving tremendous amount of computing power than each using a separate computing facility.
In the current host-centric multi-tier client-server service model, even with the cloud center consisting of a farm of servers, an Internet application is typically served through a sequence of interactions between the application-hosting server and a user's browser client over the Internet. The hosting server or a server farm usually serves multiple requests from a large number of browser clients anywhere over the Internet at any given time. Because the transmission of the sequence of interactions relies completely on the real-time performance across the entire network path between the server and any particular browser client, and the performance is often affected by factors that are beyond what the server, client and network carriers can control, e.g., data traffic, wireless network availability and bandwidth, it is impossible for the service provider to provide the quality and reliability guarantee to the end users. Most of today's mobile applications, which rely on the specific client software instead of a generic browser, also share similar limitations.
For example, a railway e-ticket application system is used to provide all e-ticket related functions for serving railway passengers and the railway operators. A railway e-ticket is usually a complicated system, partially because the complexity of functions and partially because the physical implementation of the system involves a number of sub-systems requiring integration over wide-area networks connecting many stations, ticketing offices or windows and terminals, websites, and control centers and operator offices, etc. The wide geographic area requiring network coverage and requirements for meeting the real-time performance, liability, maintainability, scalability, security and the flexibility for frequent functional upgrade for the entire system are extremely challenging, particularly when a railway network covers a geographic area of tens of thousands or more square miles and serves a market of millions. On average millions of railway tickets are sold each day through multiple sales channels, with with twice the volume over several peak periods of time during a year.
In another example, for e-travel applications, to find the best match from the ocean of information is largely handled by the general search engine, for example, at www.google.com, or a vertical search engine, such as www.travelocity.com, where the traveler enters the desired destination, and/or a set of given parameters and the search engine finds or recommend the best matches available from the web. Various models have been used in such search engine approach such as remembering what the traveler searched last time and, based on the traveler's search content, recommending related information, etc. While the search engine approach greatly expands the information scope and enables anyone not from the travel industry to find what s/he likes by themselves, anytime and anywhere, there are limitations. There is a huge amount of effort and time needed to handle all the information from the Internet in order to really understand the target destination and to find the best match. Moreover, to speed up the matching process, the description of a travel event has been more and more normalized using a simple set of parameters, thereby commoditizing the originally sophisticated event. This makes the match less meaningful and even more time consuming compared with the “expert” travel agent approach.
Thus, there is a need in the art for improvements in providing distributed Internet service models that integrates cloud computing technology, multi-tiered client/server technologies, two-tier browser/server technology for the design and implementation of a general enterprise application system. Specifically, the prior art is deficient in a Distributed Cloud Services system and models that provide stable system performance under a large volume of customer inquiries and transactions in real-time. The present invention fulfills this long-standing need and desire in the art.